Background
Aníbal Pinto Garmendia was born on 15 March 1825 in Santiago.
Aníbal Pinto Garmendia was born on 15 March 1825 in Santiago.
He began a professional diplomatic career as secretary of the Chilean Legation in Rome in 1848, where he remained for three years. After returning home, he was elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1852 and continued there until elected to the Senate in 1870. During most of the administration of President Federico Errázuriz Zañartu (1871-1876), he was minister of war and navy, and in the election of 1876, he was the government’s candidate, backed by the National Party and most Liberals. He came to office in the midst of a serious economic recession.
Pinto imposed a series of new taxes and decreed the inconvertibility of government-issued paper currency.
Even more serious was the Pacific War. For a number of years Chile and Bolivia had been in dispute over the coastal areas, where Chilean mining interests (often in conjunction with British investors) had been exploiting nitrate. When Bolivia imposed new taxes on the Anglo-Chilean enterprises in Antofagasta Province, in violation of accords with Chile, the Pinto administration declared war on Bolivia. Peru, which had a “secret” mutual assistance treaty with Bolivia, immediately entered the conflict. During the last two years of the Pinto government, the Chileans totally defeated their opponents and conquered not only the Bolivian Pacific coastal province of Antofagasta, but also the Peruvian provinces of Tarapaca, Arica, and Tacna, and even occupied the Peruvian capital of Lima.
